-
Fight the Hypo: Fake Arguments, Trolleyology, and the Limits of Hypotheticals
Jethro K. Lieberman
The hypothetical is the staple of the law school classroom and useful in most intellectual endeavors. But, this inaugural lecture argues, interlocutors frequently misuse and misinterpret responses to hypotheticals because they demand that their respondents accept the “facts” embedded within. This form of argument, dubbed “FAKE” (for “Facts Are Known Exactly”), poses “facts” that are either impossible to accept or highly improbable and that would provoke counterarguments but for the command to accept the facts as hypothesized. The author presents his thesis in part through the lens of recent literature on the ethics of runaway trolley cars (these cases constitute a field of study known as “trolleyology”) and questions whether the answers we give and the preconceptions we seem to have about the morality of saving many at the expense of one can be explained by examining responses to the hypotheticals provided. The paper also examines the FAKE argument as used to justify assisted suicide, the right to harshly cross-examine the truth-telling but infirm witness, and upholding the law by violating it.
-
Jumpstart Constitutional Law: Reading and Understanding Constitutional Law Cases
Jethro K. Lieberman
Jumpstart Constitutional Law: Reading and Understanding Constitutional Law Cases, sheds light on the threshold issues and substantive questions common to all constitutional law cases thus bringing everything into focus for the student. Key to constructing cogent answers on a Constitutional Law exam, Jethro K. Lieberman's straightforward approach teaches students how to spot the issues and respond to the relevant questions in any constitutional law case.
-
Law, Culture and Visual Studies
Richard K. Sherwin
This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual.
This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law’s representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry.
Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection.
-
Regulation of Derivative Financial Instruments (Swaps, Options, and Futures)
Ronald H. Filler and Jerry W. Markham
As a result of the Dodd-Frank Act Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, derivatives regulation has become a hot topic on Wall Street and is, therefore, of much interest to law firms with financial institutions as clients. An increasing number of classes on this subject are being taught at law schools around the country, but, to date, there has been no casebook on the subject.
This casebook explores the regulation of swaps, futures and options by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It examines the regulatory history of derivative instruments and traces the development of modern market structures while addressing the role of the exchanges, the clearinghouses, and market participants, such as futures commission merchants, swap dealers, and hedge funds that act as commodity pool operators.
Structured in a traditional format, this casebook uses cases to teach students important points of law and industry practices needed to understand the role played by derivative instruments in modern finance. The cases are accompanied by commentary from the authors expanding on the points raised in the cases. -
When Books Went to War
Molly Guptill Manning
When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry in their pockets and their rucksacks, in every theater of war.
Comprising 1,200 different titles of every imaginable type, these paperbacks were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy; in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific; in field hospitals; and on long bombing flights. They wrote to the authors, many of whom responded to every letter. They helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity. They made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. When Books Went to War is an inspiring story for history buffs and book lovers alike. -
The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice among the Worst of the Worst
Robert I. Blecker
For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor at New York Law School, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder.The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, Professor Blecker exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives.
The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.
From THE DEATH OF PUNISHMENT: SEARCHING FOR JUSTICE AMONG THE WORST OF THE WORST © 2013 by Robert Blecker. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press. All Rights Reserved.
-
Devising, Dying, and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Early Modern England
Lloyd Bonfield
Seventeenth-century England was a country obsessed with property rights. For only those who owned property were considered to have a vested interest in the maintenance of law, order and social harmony. As such, establishing the ownership of 'things' was a constant concern for all people, and nowhere is this more evident than in the cases of disputed wills. Based on a wealth of surviving evidence from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, the probate jurisdiction which probated wills of the more wealthy English property owners as well as some of those with a more modest quantity of property, this book investigates what litigation over the validity of wills reveals about the interplay between society and law. The volume investigates, catalogs, and systematizes the legal issues that were raised in will disputes in the Canterbury Court in the last half of the seventeenth century. However, this is not just a book about law and legal practice. The records from which it draws plunge us into deeply personal and often tragic situations, revealing how the last requests of the dead and dying were often ignored or misinterpreted by family, friends and creditors for their own benefit. By focusing on property law as reflected in cases of disputed wills, the book provides a glimpse at a much fuller spectrum of society than is often the case. Even people of relatively modest means were concerned to pass on their possessions, and their cases provide a snapshot of the type of objects owned and social relationships revealed by patterns of bequests. This too is true for women, who despite being denied full participation in many areas of civic life, are frequently encountered as key players in court cases over disputed wills. What emerges from this study is a picture of a society for which notions of law and private property were increasingly intertwined, yet in which courts were less concerned with formality than with ensuring that the intentions of will-makers were properly carried out.
-
FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle Over the New Deal
James F. Simon
By the author of acclaimed books on the bitter clashes between Jefferson and Chief Justice Marshall on the shaping of the nation’s constitutional future, and between Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney over slavery, secession, and the presidential war powers. Roosevelt and Chief Justice Hughes's fight over the New Deal was the most critical struggle between an American president and a chief justice in the twentieth century.
The confrontation threatened the New Deal in the middle of the nation’s worst depression. The activist president bombarded the Democratic Congress with a fusillade of legislative remedies that shut down insolvent banks, regulated stocks, imposed industrial codes, rationed agricultural production, and employed a quarter million young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps. But the legislation faced constitutional challenges by a conservative bloc on the Court determined to undercut the president. Chief Justice Hughes often joined the Court’s conservatives to strike down major New Deal legislation.
Frustrated, FDR proposed a Court-packing plan. His true purpose was to undermine the ability of the life-tenured Justices to thwart his popular mandate. Hughes proved more than a match for Roosevelt in the ensuing battle. In grudging admiration for Hughes, FDR said that the Chief Justice was the best politician in the country. Despite the defeat of his plan, Roosevelt never lost his confidence and, like Hughes, never ceded leadership. He outmaneuvered isolationist senators, many of whom had opposed his Court-packing plan, to expedite aid to Great Britain as the Allies hovered on the brink of defeat. He then led his country through World War II. -
Federal Income Taxation of Business Enterprises 4th Ed.
Richard A. Westin, Richard C.E. Beck, and Sergio Pareja
This book provides teaching materials for a basic income taxation course dealing with the taxation of partnerships, corporations, S corporations, and limited liability companies. In addition, it alludes to a short list of other business enterprises. It can definitely be completed in the usual three hours assigned to such courses, on the assumption that students will spend two hours of preparation for each hour in the classroom.
The book begins with the study of partnerships, moves to C corporations, then to S corporations, then to limited liability companies. In general, the authors take a cradle-to-grave approach to each subject. Their teaching of the course out of these materials convinces them that the order is realistic and effective.
The book is fairly rich with problems that are scattered along the way, rather than at the end of each chapter. They are not especially difficult and are designed to build confidence while at the same time forcing at least some review of the central Code provisions and pertinent regulations.
-
Foundations of Business Law and the Legal Environment (2012)
Don Mayer, Daniel M. Warner, George J. Siedel, and Jethro K. Lieberman
-
From Cape Town to Kabul: Rethinking Strategies for Pursuing Women's Human Rights (2012)
Penelope Andrews
Using her experience of living under apartheid and witnessing its downfall and the subsequent creation of new governments in South Africa, the author examines and compares gender inequality in societies undergoing political and economic transformation. By applying this process of legal transformation as a paradigm, the author applies this model to Afghanistan. These two societies serve as counterpoints through which the book engages, in a nuanced and novel way, with the many broader issues that flow from the attempts in newly democratic societies to give effect to the promise of gender equality. Developing the idea of 'conditional interdependence', the book suggests a new approach based on the communitarian values which underpin newly democratic societies and would allow women's rights to gain momentum and reap greater benefits. Broad in its thematic approach, the book generates challenging and complex questions about the achievement of gender equality. It will be of interest to academics interested in gender and human rights, international and comparative law.
-
Inside Wills and Trusts: What Matters and Why
William P. LaPiana
Inside Wills and Trusts: What Matters and Why offers students a concise, student-friendly study aid that provides a big-picture view of how all of the essential elements of this field fit together as part of a coherent framework of legal theory and practice. Using a wide variety of pedagogical aids, this new addition to the successful Inside Series offers basic coverage of the main themes of wills and trusts law, focusing on what matters and why, while providing students multiple opportunities for review.
-
Liberalism Undressed
Jethro K. Lieberman
In Liberalism Undressed, Jethro K. Lieberman returns to liberalism's roots to explain, in accessible and readable prose, why liberalism retains its power and appeal. He begins with the memorable thesis of John Stuart Mill, who drew from earlier liberal writers, which states "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Building on Mill's well-known, but rarely analyzed, Harm Principle, Liberalism Undressed undertakes to show that this widely-accepted precept-"it's a free country; I should be able to do what I want as long as I don't hurt anybody"-can justify a government robust enough to deal with pressing modern problems of human harm and suffering while restrained enough to provide people freedom to live life on their own terms. A powerful reinterpretation of liberalism's foundations, it forces us to rethink our understanding of the meaning of harm and the proper role of government in our individual and communal lives.
-
New York Evidence: 2012 Courtroom Manual (2012)
David M. Epstein and Glen Weissenberger
Table of Contents only
-
The Myth of Ephraim Tutt
Molly Guptill Manning
The Myth of Ephraim Tutt explores the true and previously untold story behind one of the most elaborate literary hoaxes in American history. Arthur Train was a Harvard-educated and well-respected attorney. He was also a best-selling author. Train’s greatest literary creation was the character Ephraim Tutt, a public-spirited attorney and champion of justice.Guided by compassion and a strong moral compass, Ephraim Tutt commanded a loyal following among general readers and lawyers alike—in fact, Tutt’s fictitious cases were so well-known that attorneys, judges, and law faculty cited them in courtrooms and legal texts. People read Tutt’s legal adventures for more than twenty years, all the while believing their beloved protagonist was merely a character and that Train’s stories were works of fiction. But in 1943 a most unusual event occurred: Ephraim Tutt published his own autobiography. The possibility of Tutt’s existence as an actual human being became a source of confusion, spurring heated debates. One outraged reader sued for fraud, and the legendary lawyer John W. Davis rallied to Train’s defense. While the public questioned whether the autobiography was a hoax or genuine, many book reviewers and editors presented the book as a work of nonfiction. In The Myth of Ephraim Tutt Molly Guptill Manning explores the controversy and the impact of the Ephraim Tutt autobiography on American culture. She also considers Tutt’s ruse in light of other noted incidents of literary hoaxes, such as those ensuing from the publication of works by Clifford Irving, James Frey, and David Rorvik, among others. As with other outstanding fictitious characters in the literary canon, Ephraim Tutt took on a life of his own. Out of affection for his favorite creation, Arthur Train spent the final years of his life crafting an autobiography that would ensure Tutt’s lasting influence—and he was spectacularly successful in this endeavor. Tutt, as the many letters written to him attest, gave comfort to his readers as they faced the challenging years of the Great Depression and World War II and renewed their faith in humanity and justice. Although Tutt’s autobiography bewildered some of his readers, the great majority were glad to have read the “life” story of this cherished character.
-
Humanity's Law
Ruti G. Teitel
Post-Cold War history has witnessed a transformation in the relationship of law to violence in global politics. The normative foundations of the international legal order have been shifting their emphasis from state security to human security: the security of persons and peoples. Increasingly, courts, tribunals, other international bodies, and political actors draw from this new framework to assess the rights and wrongs of conflict; determine whether and how to intervene; and impose accountability and responsibility on state and non-state actors. The result of this shift is the law of humanity — a framework that spans the law of war, international human-rights law, and international criminal justice. The author explores the humanity-law phenomenon by looking to its historical roots, its contemporary tendencies, and its effect on the discourse of international relations. Humanity law’s framework is most evident in the jurisprudence of the tribunals — international, regional and domestic — adjudicating disputes often spanning issues of internal and international conflict and security. Yet because most international legal scholarship focuses on individual regimes or tribunals, it is easy to miss the evolution of a jurisprudence connecting the rulings of diverse tribunals and institutions. This jurisprudence tends to expand rights and responsibilities to encompass wider circles of conduct; sweep in additional actors within conflicts; increase the legal responsibilities of states, even for the behavior of non-state actors; and exhibit less deference to the traditional sovereign prerogatives of states, where doing so would interfere with the overriding goal of protecting persons and peoples.
-
The Lawyer's Practice: A Context and Practice Case File (2011)
Kris Franklin
This innovative case file provides materials for students to work in the role of attorney as they learn and master the primary skills needed for legal practice. The file is equally suitable for first-year legal practice/legal writing classes or upper-level simulation courses focused on interviewing, counseling, negotiation or pre-trial litigation.
Student-attorneys represent clients on both sides of a lawsuit through a realistic and carefully-sequenced series of exercises that track the stages of pre-trial work while encouraging mastery of many basic skills of legal practice: research, formal and informal legal writing, interviewing and counseling clients, fact development, discovery, motion practice, negotiation and drafting.
Every chapter of the case file is scaffolded on students' earlier work and critical reflection, permitting students to develop a confident sense of professional identity as they see the results of their efforts play out as the case develops. Chapters feature lively commentary giving an overview of the assigned task and contextualizing it within the goals for the case.
The materials are accompanied by a comprehensive Teacher's Manual that includes suggestions for teaching and using the case file, detailed instructions for clients, and additional documents available only to counsel for each side.
This book is part of the Context and Practice Series, edited by Michael Hunter Schwartz, Professor of Law and Dean of the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific.
-
Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque: Arabesques & Entanglements
Richard K. Sherwin
Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice and theory of law. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos documenting crimes and accidents to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom is becoming an offshoot of visual meaning making. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. Law as image also shares broader cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image but also the mimetic capacity itself, the human ability to represent reality. What is real, and what is simulation? This is the hallmark of the baroque, when dreams fold into dreams, like immersion in a seemingly endless matrix of digital appearances. When fact-based justice recedes, laws proliferate within a field of uncertainty. Left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law’s claim to power. Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque offers a jurisprudential paradigm that is equal to the challenge that current cultural conditions present.
-
Cases, Materials and Problems in Property (Third Edition)
Richard H. Chused
This casebook raises interesting and challenging problems concerning the development of property law. Property concepts are introduced through cutting edge issues, such as intellectual property, rights of publicity, and ownership rights in the human body. Historical dimensions are presented through discussions of laws which formerly excluded certain individuals from most forms of ownership and property control, such as Native Americans, African Americans, and women. The text covers traditional topics: estates in land, landlord and tenant laws, transfers of property, private land use controls, and constitutional limitations on public land use controls.
-
Sexuality Law 2nd Ed. (2015 Online Supplements)
Arthur S. Leonard and Patricia A. Cain
This book brings together materials from a variety of legal disciplines to explore the interaction of legal policy and human sexuality. It keeps abreast with current LGBT issues with regular supplements. The authors have released the 2015 supplement online. It can be viewed here.
-
The Founding Fathers Reconsidered
Richard B. Bernstein
Here is a vividly written and compact overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as the "Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen.
In The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings--people much like us--who nevertheless achieved political greatness. They emerge here as men who sought to transcend their intellectual world even as they were bound by its limits, men who strove to lead the new nation even as they had to defer to the great body of the people and learn with them the possibilities and limitations of politics. Bernstein deftly traces the dynamic forces that molded these men and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization's Age of Enlightenment. He analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems--among them independence, federalism, equality, slavery, and the separation of church and state--that both shaped and circumscribed the founders' achievements as the United States sought its place in the world. -
Competence in the Law: From Legal Theory to Clinical Application (2008)
Michael L. Perlin, Pamela R. Champine, Henry A. Dlugacz, and Mary A. Connell
The best source for a comprehensive overview of mental competency in criminal, mental disability, and civil law, Competence in the Law prepares mental health professionals to assess questions of both civil and criminal competence and to counsel lawyers and judges in cases in which these issues are germane. A landmark contribution to forensic practice, this book equips you to expertly address critical issues faced in conducting assessments within the legal system.
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
